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Sign Shop Spotlight: Bergen Sign Company
One full-service sign company that’s finding high-reaching success through the use of service vehicle equipment is Bergen Sign Company in Patterson, New Jersey. The 33,000-square foot facility currently hosts corporate offices, a full metal shop, a graphics department, an installation department, a neon plant, and a paint shop.
Bergen Sign Company has been active in the industry since 1918. Chief Operating Officer Rich Walker and Tom Schneider (son of the former owner) bought the company about twelve years ago. “We do a lot of installations for out-of-state sign companies, we do a lot of manufacturing for our own customers, we do have customers across the country we do work for,” says Walker. “We’re a manufacturer and installer for any type of sign.”
Bergen Sign also demonstrates that quality customer service, product design, and manufacturing ensure long-lasting and successful customer relationships. Their ninety years of service has resulted from continuous innovation and going the extra mile to create the ideal sign systems for their clients.
The business has adapted to an ever-changing economic and social environment. Innovative new sign technology is quickly analyzed and deployed by Bergen to the benefit of their customers.
According to Walker, the company purchased its first service vehicle about ten years ago—strictly a crane truck. Three years later, they bought a combination bucket/crane truck, which they used to get their guys or materials up to building roofs to perform service calls or installations for all types of signage (channel letters and box signs, for example).
The company purchased another model—Baker Equipment’s MX-200 DC bucket truck—this past December at the United States Sign Council’s (USSC) Sign World USA event in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and has been using it to perform various installations and service calls. Schneider and Walker showed the truck to their crew leaders and made the purchase with Baker and Direct Capital Corporation, before they returned home. By early January, their new MX-200 DC was in the field, serving customers in a unique and profitable manner.
With the acquisition of their new Baker MX-200 DC sign truck, Bergen has reached new levels of speed and flexibility in fulfilling their clients’ signage needs. The Baker MX-200 DC sign truck features a unique articulating/double-telescopic aerial tower and an advanced design knuckle boom crane mounted on a single Non-Commercial Drivers License (CDL) truck chassis. Now one compact truck does the job of two traditional boom trucks faster and with fewer deployed assets. “The truck has been going out on a daily basis,” says Walker. “We don’t necessarily have long, extended installations. They usually last half a day or a whole day.”
According to Baker Equipment, the MX-200 DC offers greater job site flexibility, combined with reduced operating cost and reduced manpower requirements. The MX-200 DC combines a full functioning, highly articulating Pagliero sixty-six-foot aerial tower with a separately mounted full-functioning Palfinger sixty-two-foot articulating crane, with digger/auger attachment, together with utility trailer hauling capability. One non-CDL truck now replaces two conventional utility boom trucks and the hole digging equipment.
This unique combination of aerial tower height, side-reach, and crane capacity, in a non-CDL package was achieved by first selecting a high-strength, all-aluminum Pagliero Multitel aerial tower, having three-sections telescopic upper and three-sections telescopic lower articulating booms. This product is very lightweight and compact, while retaining high strength and two-man lifting capacity.
Note:Interestingly there appears to be a lot of years of experience at work here. In addition to Bergen’s long history, Baker Equipment, founded in 1919 in Virginia, is a fourth-generation, family-owned company, having a significant history in the development and servicing of special utility truck products.
Pagliero, manufacturer of the MX-200 tower, is a family-owned Italian company established back in 1911, having ninety-six years of experience in the field of hydraulics (applied to lifting and access equipment). In Europe, they have expertly fulfilled the growing demand for truck-mounted equipment that provides quick and safe ways to carry out work at all heights, with their wide range of reliable Multitel aerial tower products. Having similar philosophies, a partnership has developed between the Pagliero and Baker principals to bring these advanced aerial Multitel tower products to North America. The first such product is the MX-200, which Baker specially adapts to the American market.
Established in 1932 in Austria, Palfinger has, for many years, served a leading international manufacturer of hydraulic lifting, loading, and handling systems. Their core product is the truck-mounted knuckle-boom crane. Innovation and diversification of products and services form the strategic pillars of their corporate strategy. The company’s main guiding principle is to make customers throughout the world more successful. PALFINGER has service, production, and assembly sites in North America and other parts of the world.
Today Walker is using the smaller, non-CDL truck (thirty feet of side-reach and sixty-one-foot maximum height) out at job sites and has found that its mobility and flexibility is nice for getting into parking spaces. “If you’re in a crowded area, you sometimes have tight spaces that you need to get into,” he says. “And the thirty-foot outreach is very interesting to us. If we’re working around a parapet wall or a lower roof that projects outward, the thirty-foot outreach allows us to reach different things than our bigger truck.
“The aerial tower is built such that it has a three-section telescopic lower boom and a three-section telescopic upper boom with a knuckle in-between. So it’s sort of like an elbow-type machine except both upper and lower booms will extend to the degree you want them to. So that way, you’re able to collapse it down like a Swiss army knife and it fits very compactly in the bed of a small truck.”
When buying a new service truck or sign crane, Walker recommends a practice that he’s been using: From the outset, assign the truck to one of your skilled employees. This person will then be able to contact the truck manufacturer for advice and test it out. Then he or she will be able to train other employees to use it. “In a relatively short amount of time, [our guy] has already figured out how to fine-tune the controls and set things up the way he wants it,” Walker says. “And now he’ll be able to provide all the smart tips he’s learned to others at our company who might be using it.”
One of the big questions when it comes to service trucks is determining whether you need to own the vehicle or rent it for a job. Walker believes that the final choice in this regard should be based on the size of the company and how much time one intends to use this vehicle. “If you’re renting a truck once a week or a couple of days a week, it’s up to you to determine if you’re willing to take that chance of ownership,” he says. “You have to determine if you’re going to be finding work every day. Obviously you can’t own every piece of equipment. You’re going to have to rent some things.”
Bergen’s track record with the use of service vehicles and equipment is exceptional and suggests a good indicator that their success with these models will allow them to reach for as many sign installation and service jobs as wanted.
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